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Updated: Feb 28, 2026

Isolation and Screening from Soil Biodiversity for Fungi Involved in the Degradation of Recalcitrant Materials
Published on: May 16, 2022
Specialized aldo-keto reductases trigger complete degradation of mycotoxin deoxynivalenol
Weijie He1, Renyi Xiong2, Mengru Zheng1
1College of Plant Science and Technology, Huazhong Agricultural University, Wuhan, People's Republic of China.
Abstract:
The mycotoxin deoxynivalenol (DON) poses severe threats to human and animal well-being globally. Enzymatic degradation is the most effective way to eliminate DON toxicity, yet no catalytic process for complete degradation of DON has been uncovered. Here, we show that a metabolic pathway initiated by C3-epimerization and C8-reduction is responsible for complete degradation of DON in the DON-metabolizing bacterium Nocardioides sp. S5-5. Two horizontally transferred aldo-keto reductase genes, DONepi and DONrd, have evolved to orchestrate C3-epimerization and C8-reduction respectively. Notably, the octameric-structured DONepi alone catalyzes C3-epimerization of DON by steering the rigid-body rotation of the transient 3-keto intermediate for stereoinverting reduction. Moreover, DONrd can catalyze the C8-reduction of DON and its C3-epimerized product 3-epi-DON simultaneously to form C8-hydroxyl products, which facilitates the further degradation by a potential oxidase and other putative enzymes. DONepi expression in transgenic plants confers resistance to DON, representing potential for controlling mycotoxin contamination pre- and postharvest.
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